As a long time Red Hatter I am lacking the understanding of alot of some of the nuances and inner workings of dpkg and apt.

I have a problem that I could easily solve with yum/rpm and presume there is a solution on dpkg/apt -- forcing the architecture to 32bit from 64bit.

IE:

sudo yum install foo.i386 bar.i386 nachos.i386 beer.i386

I am sure there is a way to do this on dpkg/apt, but how? I have a few packages that I need the i386 versions of that the compat package isn't doing the trick. Rather than go ape as instructed and manually dropping files from the 32 bit revision, I am going to use the package manager for what it was invented for :P